Privacy and cookies
What we store, why, who else can see it, and how to get rid of it.
The short version
We store what you do on this site so we can order it for you. We do not ask for your name. We do send your reading behaviour, under a pseudonym, to the company that powers our ranking, and they use it to train models they sell — which under laws like the CCPA is probably a sale of personal information, so we are not going to claim otherwise. Details below. You can delete everything at any time by asking.
What we collect
- A pseudonymous identifier in a first-party cookie, set only after you agree on the welcome screen. It is a random value; it is not derived from anything about you.
- Your interactions — which headlines were shown, opened, liked, disliked, saved, shared or hidden, and when.
- Your settings — theme, layout, sort order, muted sources and keywords.
- Your email address, name and profile picture, if you sign in with Google. We never see or store a password — there is not one to store.
- Ordinary server logs, including IP address, used for security and abuse prevention.
Cookies we set
mp_consent— records that you accepted this policy. Without it, nothing else is set.mp_uid— the pseudonymous reading profile.mp_session— keeps you signed in. Set only when you sign in, and removed when you sign out.mp_csrf— a security token that prevents other sites from acting on your behalf.- A participation cookie set by the compute script, recording whether you have opted out of it. See Your device helps run the writer below.
None of these are advertising cookies. Advertising, where shown, is served by third parties who may set their own — see below.
Signing in with Google
Google is the only way to get an account here. There is no password to choose, forget, reuse or have stolen, and no way to register an address nobody has checked: Google tells us whether it has verified the mailbox, and if it has not, the sign-in is refused.
When you sign in we ask Google for three things, and only these three:
- Your email address, which is your account here, and Google's confirmation that it is verified.
- Your name, shown back to you in the account panel so you can tell which account you are using.
- Your profile picture, shown in the same place. It is loaded from Google, not copied here.
We do not ask for, and cannot see, your Google password, your contacts, your files, your calendar or your mail. We do not receive a token that would let us act as you, and nothing we hold would let us sign in to Google on your behalf.
None of it goes anywhere else. The reading behaviour described above is shared with our ranking partner under a pseudonym; what Google tells us about you is not part of that and never has been. Your name, address and picture are used for signing you in and for showing you your own account, and for nothing else — they are not sold, not shared, not sent to advertisers and not used to train anything. That is both our own rule and a condition of Google letting us offer this.
Signing out ends the session. Ask us using the address below and the account and everything attached to it is deleted; you can also revoke this site's access from your Google account permissions page at any time.
Your device helps run the writer
The briefs on this site are written by a language model that runs on the mPAKT compute network rather than on rented hardware. That network is made of the browsers of people reading the site — including, while this page is open, yours. It is what keeps the site free to run.
Concretely: a script from vtmu.mpakt.dev starts a background worker that performs arithmetic on data it is sent. It runs off the main thread, so it does not slow the page down; it holds its data in memory under a fixed cap; and it stops when you close the tab. It does not read this page, your cookies, or anything else on your device, and it is not advertising or cryptocurrency mining.
- It starts when the page loads. The script shows its own notice the first time, and you can stop it there or at any time afterwards under Settings → Compute. Your choice is remembered in a cookie on this domain.
- It can use electricity and data. Work runs on your processor or graphics hardware, so on a laptop or phone it uses battery, and results travel over your connection.
- Two participants sometimes connect directly. When one browser needs a result another produced, the two may connect peer-to-peer rather than route through a server. That makes the two devices’ IP addresses visible to each other, in the same way any direct connection does.
We think that is a fair trade and we would rather state it plainly than bury it. If you would rather not take part, switch it off — nothing else about the site changes, and you still get every story and every brief.
Who else receives data
Our ranking partner (PriceOwl). To order your feed we send candidate headlines and your interactions to PriceOwl. The identifier we send is a one-way hash of your local identifier: it is stable enough to improve ranking and cannot be reversed into your session or matched to your account, and we never send your email address or your name.
What matters more than the identifier is what happens next. PriceOwl does not rank for us and then forget. Your interactions become training data for the recommendation models they build, and they sell access to those models to other customers. Your reading here makes a commercial product better, and PriceOwl is paid for it.
We are not going to dress that up. Under privacy laws that define the word broadly — California's CCPA and CPRA in particular, where a sale means disclosing personal information to a third party for anything of value, not only for cash — this arrangement is likely a sale or a share of personal information. We would rather say so than hide behind the fact that the identifier is a hash: a pseudonym stable enough to build a profile against is still personal data under the GDPR.
What that means for you. If you would rather not take part, decline on the welcome screen, or ask us to delete your profile at any time using the address below — that stops the flow and removes what has already been sent. You keep the whole site either way: without a profile the feed is ordered by what is newest and most shared rather than by you.
Advertising. This site carries advertising. Ad networks, including Google, use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads based on your visits to this and other sites. Google's use of advertising cookies is described in its own policies, and you can opt out of personalised advertising through Google's Ads Settings. We do not pass your email address, account or reading profile to any advertiser.
Publishers. When you open an article you leave this site, and the publisher's own privacy policy applies from that point.
How long we keep it
Interaction history is capped per reader and the oldest entries are discarded as new ones arrive. Sessions expire after thirty days. Delete your account and the profile attached to it goes with it.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to erase it — including the whole profile — by writing to our contact address. Clearing this site's cookies in your browser detaches you from your anonymous profile immediately.
Children
This service is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.